Mafia Trial Opens With Peace Plea

PALERMO, SICILY — The reputed godfather of the Mafia in Palermo sent a veiled message of peace Monday from his cage in court to opposing factions in the Sicilian drug war.

On the opening day of the trial of 474 alleged members of the Cosa Nostra, reputed godfather Luciano Liggio, 71, shouted: ``I have no problems with anybody.`` The phrase hung ominously in the fortified concrete courtroom, built at a cost of $22 million especially for this trial.

Mafia experts said that if a godfather says he has no problems with anybody, he means to put an end to a feud.

During the feud in the early 1980s, Liggio`s Corleone clan allgedly murdered and tortured members of other clans to gain control of the Sicilian connection, the lucrative heroin trade to the United States. Once in control, the Corleonese assassinated public figures and police chiefs.

Now Liggio and his men are on trial for drug trafficking, murder and criminal association after members of the vanquished clans, particularly Mafia boss Tommaso Buschetta, turned state evidence to revenge themselves.

The trial, which began Monday in a siege-like atmosphere, intends to unravel the story of a drug war that left the Sicilian connection in pieces and reduced the narcotics gush from Sicily to a trickle.

Liggio stole the opening day, reserved for procedural purposes, when he tried to fire his lawyer and asked the court to give him the right to join other defendants in their cages and to share a cell with others in prison.

``I want to become a social person again,`` he boss told the court.

As the biggest Mafia trial in history began here, fewer than half the 474 defendants chose to face the battery of cameras pointed at the 30 steel cages around the concrete bunker. One hundred twenty-one of the accused are being tried in absentia while police still search for them.

As court president Alfonso Giordano swore in the 26-member jury, the church bells tolled all over Palermo and public offices and schools observed a one-minute silence for the hundreds of Mafia victims. Schools throughout Italy held special classes and assemblies to debate the fight against the Mafia while in the Sicilian capital a 3,000-men special police force took painstaking security precautions.

In the semicircular courtroom, as big as a modern theater with a raised stage for the court and a crucifix on the wall as only decoration, the faces of the men who allegedly ran the lucrative ``Sicilian connection,`` the heroin trade, the kidnap, extortion and building rackets, began to move into the public limelight.

There was Liggio, bespectacled with a stubbly white beard, in a cage of his own. Liggio, considered the mastermind of Italy`s flourishing kidnap operations (which in turn financed the drug traffic) sat impassively through the opening procedures for hours before he talked.

In a cage near him, hunched in his overcoat, pale and broken, stood Pippo Calo, the alleged financial brain of the multinational Cosa Nostra operation with its American link, the so-called Pizza Connection. Beside him, dragging at a cigarette, sat Giuseppe Buonuomo, the alleged mediator between the Sicilian and American interests of ``the company.`` Still on the run is Michele Greco, who will be accused at the trial of having ordered the assassination of 97 people, most of them members of other Mafia clans.

Most of the remaining defendants are reputed footsoldiers, alleged to be contract killers and enforcers.